Is Dom, Is Good: NSW State Election (March 25)

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In hilarious news.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/former-labor-mp-switches-to-one-nation-weeks-before-nsw-election-20230117-p5cd8x.html

The disgruntled Bankstown MP screwed over by the redistribution has turned full heel and done a Latham. And she'll probably stay in parliament! She's been given the second spot on the PHON upper house ticket. Knowing NSW Labor we're gonna find out the corruption allegations she threw around were somehow still true.

She accused her former party of being captured by “left-wing extremists and property developer mafia”. “[Labor leader] Chris Minns as premier and a Labor government will see NSW go both woke and broke. I know the true agenda of the people currently sitting on Chris Minns’ frontbench – they are from the extreme left,” she said.

Mihailuk also said One Nation was the only party that would focus on the cost of living crisis and rising energy bills, and described her fierce opposition to “drug legalisation and gender fluidity teaching in schools”.

Mihailuk took aim at Latham in the chamber in 2017, condemning his comments about multiculturalism in Australia and lamenting her disappointment in someone the Labor Party had once held in “high regard”.

“I would describe this transformation of a former politician as a Shakespearean tragedy. Mark Latham claimed that 90 per cent of the people in Fairfield who he approached for comment on multiculturalism could not speak English,” she said. “But to me Mark Latham, a burly bloke with an ugly mug, accosted some poor people on the street and thrust a microphone into their faces … Mark Latham is just a buffoon.”

Now this is exciting! It's disappointing to see warmed-over American culture war vocabulary here, but I guess that's to be expected. I am very curious about the internal politics in Bankstown Labor that led to this point. I've commented before on how odd it is that minority areas tend to be represented by white MPs and I'm interested in the motivations of this particular white MP.

I am also curious about the allegation that Labor is in bed not only with the far left (this is to be expected) but also with developers. What are the politics in Australia of throwing around accusations about developers? I don't really know what the relationship is between developers and politics in a country where "mortgage belt" is a regularly-used term, but I'm sure it's interesting.

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Blue Mountains - it's hard to believe that this was traditionally the bellweather seat in New South Wales looking at results this century. The Tories probably only won in 2011 because of vote-splitting and Labor won easily here in 2015 and 2019. Frankly, the bigger long-term threat is the Greens.

This area doesn't feel obviously left-wing to me, so it's interesting that it's a Labor safe seat now. Does the tourism industry have a major impact here? If so, is there anywhere else in Australia where this is the case?

Penrith - along with East Hills, this is the Liberals most marginal seat. And unlike East Hills, Ayres doesn't have a sophmore surge to bail him out and has had a few corruption allegations (though he has since been cleared). Yet it sounds like this is basically a total tossup. Perhaps the strong Liberal results in Penrith federally help, perhaps it's a case of Ayres throwing the kitchen sink at the seat, perhaps Labor should've chosen a better candidate. What does worry me is that if Labor can't win the seat, it'll be hard for them to get to a position where they're likely to win barring some very weird swings....

There are some local issues here, right? Penrith has the best team in the world and the Coalition government has been very firm on dumping a whole bunch of money specifically in Penrith to get that team a new stadium. On current polling it shouldn't matter, but it would make sense to me if the swing to Labor here were much weaker than in similar areas.

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Penrith - along with East Hills, this is the Liberals most marginal seat. And unlike East Hills, Ayres doesn't have a sophmore surge to bail him out and has had a few corruption allegations (though he has since been cleared). Yet it sounds like this is basically a total tossup. Perhaps the strong Liberal results in Penrith federally help, perhaps it's a case of Ayres throwing the kitchen sink at the seat, perhaps Labor should've chosen a better candidate. What does worry me is that if Labor can't win the seat, it'll be hard for them to get to a position where they're likely to win barring some very weird swings....

There are some local issues here, right? Penrith has the best team in the world and the Coalition government has been very firm on dumping a whole bunch of money specifically in Penrith to get that team a new stadium. On current polling it shouldn't matter, but it would make sense to me if the swing to Labor here were much weaker than in similar areas.

Ehhh, I'm not sure what Penrith have done in the NRL has really influenced things. Part of the issue is that Emma Husar (the former Labor MP for Lindsay) self-imploded, but also I think it's a case of the more #populist image of Scott Morrison played well here compared to other parts of Sydney. I think demographic change and growth of new suburbia has helped the Liberals here too. It doesn't help Labor that the seat is very white, for example (whereas new suburbs with a lot of Asian migrants tend to be quite marginal).

I don't mean to suggest that Penrith winning in the NRL actually matters, but I'm thinking here of the state government's plan to commit a lot of money to constructing suburban stadiums, which as I understand it has morphed into a plan to commit $300 million to a stadium in Penrith and nowhere else. It's hard not to read this as a sign that the government really wants Stuart Ayres to keep his seat.

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There’s a couple of winnable regional seats where Labor aren’t getting much of a swing, but there’s others where they’ve gotten a massive one, and Sydney is across the board good for Labor (except some of Labour’s safe Western Sydney seats, where a big swing would have been wasted anyways).

Looks like we have really strong anti-government swings in Sydney (and this seems to be the case all across the city, meaning that you can't have the narrative of effete coastal elites contrasted to real Aussie battlers) but much less in non-metropolitan seats. In particular, no National seat other than Monaro had a significant swing to Labor. I'm not sure if there was anything in particular during the campaign that pointed to this result.

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What happens in Australia when a party forms government based on having a majority in the lower house - but another party controls the upper legislative council and it refuses to pass any legislation?

Realistically this is not an issue. The last Australian elected government to face an opposition majority in the upper house was the Labor government elected in Victoria in 1999, but at the time Victoria elected its upper house in single-member constituencies, which is no longer the case. Outside Victoria, in 1989 the Labor government of Western Australia was reelected with a Coalition majority in the upper house, but that was under a system with significant rural malapportionment that is no longer in effect.

The last time that the main opposition party in an Australian lower house held at least 50% of the seats in the upper house under a system similar to one used today was in South Australia in 1982, when the Liberal Party formed the opposition but held exactly 50% of seats in the upper house. In that election, 89% of votes cast for the upper house were cast for one of the two major parties. That is difficult to imagine now. In general this scenario is not really worth considering.